Two years ago, the first National Summit brought together a vibrant network of people with lived experience, service providers, commissioners and policy makers, each with different skills and expertise and all committed to achieving change for people facing multiple disadvantage. This year the Agency are delighted that the conference will add a research focus, as they join forces with the original summit organisers.

They are particularly looking for workshops and papers that are delivered in partnership to help draw links, cross boundaries and demonstrate collaborations between individuals with lived experience, researchers, commissioners, practitioners and policy makers. That said, please do not let the partnership aspect put you off from submitting a proposal. The organizing committee is happy to help bring people together, whether they see the potential for complementary or joint workshop.
Each workshop or paper must fall under at least one of these broad themes:

drawing expertise from lived experience;

achieving systems change;

understanding and responding to diversity;

and fostering partnership and collaborations to achieve change.

They are keen to publish papers out of the conference, either as a guest journal edition, or as an edited volume. If any of you sit on editorial boards for potentially relevant and interested journals the Agency would welcome you to get in touch to make this possible.

Cardiff University’s School of Law and Politics, supported by the ESRC Doctoral Training Partnership for Wales (Wales DTP), invites applications for funded PhD study. The studentships will commence in October 2017.

These particular studentships, known as ‘collaborative studentships’, involve liaison with a non-academic organization(s) at several key stages of the research. Cardiff School of Law and Politics are offering two collaborative studentships in Empirical Studies in Law, a field of research which brings together methods from social science to address legal challenges in society and inform policy development. One of the projects focuses on equality issues: “Securing Equality Rights and Access to Justice in Wales” under the supervision of Dr. Sara Drake.

The EHRC research team provides a quarterly research database newsletter. Each newsletter has a specific theme as well as containing summaries of new research reports and a reading list of key literature on a particular topic.

Research by the Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion at LSE shows ‘a significant demand for accessible housing to rent and buy’.

Conducted by LSE Housing and Communities (CASE) and Ipsos MORI, the report, The hidden housing market, uncovers a fresh view that challenges assumptions about the potential for disabled people to buy their own home. The report also sheds light on the wider appeal of homes that deliver higher quality accessible features.

Headline findings:

1.8 million disabled people have an unmet housing need – 580,000 of whom are of working age (there are 11.6 million disabled people in the UK)

Of the 1.8 million disabled people needing accessible homes, 56% are home owners with 39% having incomes in the top half of the income distribution

19% of the British public would most favour moving to a different property specifically designed or adapted to enable them to live independently in later life

Impact of unmet housing need for accessible housing – disabled people living in inaccessible homes are four times more likely to be unemployed.

A paper published by the Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion at LSE suggests that the economic divergence between London and the Northern regions in England continues to grow.

The gaps are also growing in relation to a number of social outcomes, such as education and health, with improvement in these outcomes in London being in line with economic conditions in the capital bouncing back to pre-recession levels or beyond while the North lags behind. But economic growth in London has not resulted in reduced poverty or inequality.

The focus of this report is the distribution of household income in the UK. It assesses the changes to average incomes, income inequality and poverty that occurred in the latest year of data (2014–15), and put these in historical context using comparable data spanning the last 50 years.

The ‘new poor’ tend to live in households where there is someone in work. Only a third of children below the government’s absolute poverty line now live in a workless household – two thirds of those classified as poor are poor despite the fact that at least one of their parents is in work.

Tessa Wright is a senior lecturer in Human Resource Management at the Centre for Research in Equality and Diversity, Queen Mary University of London, UK.

Examining women’s diverse experiences of male-dominated work, this ground-breaking book explores what sexuality and gender means to women working in the construction and transport industries. Using accounts from heterosexual women and lesbians working in professional, manual and operational roles, Gender and Sexuality in Male-Dominated Occupations adopts an intersectional approach to examine advantage and disadvantage on the basis of gender, sexuality and occupational class in these sectors. Drawing on interviews and focus groups, the author examines why women choose to enter male-dominated industries, their experiences of workplace relations, their use of women’s support networks and trade unions, and the interface between home and work lives. Presenting international and UK-based examples of effective interventions to increase women’s participation in male-dominated work, this important book highlights the need for political will to tackle women’s underrepresentation, and suggests directions for the future.

The aim of the review by Abigail McKnight, Magali Duque and Mark Rucci is to assess the effectiveness of education, wage setting institutions and welfare states in reducing inequality. Education both empowers people and provides them with tradeable skills to secure a decent income – greater equality in individuals’ ability to generate income in the labour market is key to producing more equitable outcomes.

Evidence shows that imbalances in power result in some workers being underpaid while others are overpaid. Collective wage bargaining and minimum wages have proved to be successfulin reducing wage inequality.

Curbs on the power of top executives, power which has allowed them to take an increasing share of the wagebill to the detriment of other workers and form a politically powerful elite, need further development.

Welfare states need to evolve to meet the challenges of ‘new inequalities’ and changing employment landscapes, but are essential now and will continue to be essential in the future to help individuals redistribute income over their own lives as well as between the rich and poor.